Hotel, conference centre planned for Sudbury tower

Sudbury entrepreneur Jeff Perreault plans to build a conference centre and hotel on the site of the water tower, which overlooks downtown Sudbury. The plan includes retaining the water tower, which will be integrated into the plan at a future date.

When it comes to repurposing the Pearl
Street water tower in downtown Sudbury, Jeff Perreault knows what it
won’t be: a restaurant.

“I am not the restaurant guy,” he
laughed during an interview to discuss his plans for the
112-foot-tall behemoth, which was decommissioned in 1998.

Instead of taking a cue from the city
of Lethbridge, Alta., which opened a trio of restaurants in its old
water tower in the early 2000s, Perreault is mulling a different
approach. The water tower will serve as a focal point for a
conference centre and 125-room hotel, which Perreault hopes to see
built within the next five years.

He envisions a large conference centre
on the 2.5 acres of property overlooking the city, linking it to a
downtown-built hotel via a bridge that will cross over Notre Dame
Avenue. The hotel will have 16,000-square feet on each of five or six
floors, with 25 rooms per floor, while the conference centre will
have multi-level parking with 420 spaces.

“There’s a definite market for it,”
Perreault said. “I’ve found probably five groups of hotel owners
that are looking at setting up their franchise or having a hotel in
operation in Sudbury. They all want downtown.”

Perreault believes once the property is
developed, it will attract the right business concept and the right
tenant who will want to be in the water tower. Shared workspaces, a
multi-purpose facility, executive offices or even the city’s
proposed casino are all possibilities he is entertaining.

After Sudbury’s other, smaller
downtown water tower was demolished last fall, advocates of the
56-year-old Pearl Street structure felt a new urgency to protect it.
Perreault felt that same urgency when he returned to his hometown in
2006 after a five-year absence.

He was looking for space for
advertising billboards when the water tower caught his eye.

“I always loved the water tower as a
kid,” he said. “I thought, ‘I wonder what’s happening with
that thing. Where’s it going?’”

As it turned out, its former owner,
Cory Prouse, was looking to divest the structure and the two worked
out a deal over the next few months. By November 2010, Perreault had
purchased the property, and by February, had installed five
advertising boards, measuring 32 feet by 20 feet, the revenue from
which pays for the property.

Four of the five billboards are all
rented for the next four years, Perreault said. His next step is to
get financing in place for the hotel-conference centre project.

He recognizes he’ll have to attract
an out-of-town investor with deep pockets, and with the site plan
complete and the engineering complete, he wants to see financing
secured within six months.

“It’s finding the right investor
and then everything else falls into place,” he said.

To date, he’s had roughly 30
conversations with people about their ideas, but is always looking
for more input, and he encourages people to share their ideas via the
water tower website or Facebook page.

A new conference centre will provide
different options to planners arranging their events, and the
economic spinoff could be substantial, Perreault said. Beyond the
jobs in construction and operations, Sudbury could become a new
choice of destination for planners and their events.

“It’s really giving more options,
more choice, better views,” he said. “Getting all those big
conferences that are potentially not coming to town because we don’t
have the room to accommodate all of them…there will be a ripple of
services that come with the conference/banquet hall facility.”